Suffolk University is, at its heart, a business school. And if you want free business lessons better than anything you’ll learn from the Sawyer Business School, look no further than the cost-cutting measures impacting food service at Suffolk. 

Firstly, the “Starbucks” in Sawyer. When I regale the offerings of the Sawyer Starbucks to wide-eyed freshmen they look at me with disbelief, like I’m some great-grandfather talking about the “Good Ol’ Days.” But just a year ago there used to be real, actual people there! People who would take your order when you spoke to them, serving coffee, tea or water! Additionally, they had overpriced baked goods, drinks, snacks and those giant boxes of candy I refuse to believe anyone actually bought. 

More importantly, you could use your Ram Card! You know, that plastic thing in your wallet that comes with the mandatory $1,500 meal plan? It was an opportunity to spend those meal points, on, you know, meals. But now you need to watch those meals slowly eject from a rotating coil as you haplessly bend over and fiddle your hands around through the two anti-theft doors to retrieve your hearty and nutritious fun-size bag of Cheetos. 

And no, you can’t use your meal plan money on any of this. But hey, now you get the personal touch of getting your lesser-quality coffee from a giant robot instead. There’s that “Farmer’s Fridge” thing in the corner which immediately tells you how much they respect your intelligence by hoping you’ll think whatever comes out of that giant white wedge will be any more wholesome or nutritious because it has the word “farmer” on it. 

But what would I know, the only thing I actually see people eat in the morning are the breakfast sandwiches. They exist as an easy way to get a full breakfast into our fast-paced college student gullets. And as much as I rag on Chartwells for how seemingly most of their menu consists of indigestible deep fried food and hamburgers, the breakfast sandwiches were good. Fresh eggs cracked on the spot and, because it was in the Samia cafeteria, you could choose whatever kind of cheese and veggie toppings you wanted. 

Not anymore! Fast forward to today, where the breakfast sandwiches have been moved to the only remaining Starbucks just outside of the cafeteria. Alongside that, your choice of toppings with an egg cooked fresh on a griddle have been replaced with a pre-cooked egg disc reheating inside of an industrial toaster oven capable of preparing only two sandwiches at a time compared to the griddle’s eight. Which, mind you, are eerily similar to the cheaper ones offered at Dunkin’ Donuts, a two-minute walk from Samia. 

These downscaling decisions, all compounded on one another, have resulted in an obvious consequence: the last remaining Starbucks location having to take on the additional groups of people that would have otherwise used those other locations. This individual nook outside of the Samia cafeteria now inundated with three times the people has gone about as well as one would expect it to.

What has resulted from this catastrophic lapse in any altruistic judgment from Suffolk and Chartwells is five foodservice employees all shuffling by each other in a frenzy, needing to prepare food, drink and baked goods in a corridor with the surface area of a Smith Hall Single room. From that tiny corridor is a single register, resulting in students lining up so far that it blocks the entrances to the room every morning at around 9:30 a.m. like clockwork. 

At the same time, there’s at most only a few students in the cafeteria ordering their signature spongy blocks of scrambled eggs because almost everybody just eats the breakfast sandwiches! Since the dawn of time, food has been a symbol of hospitality. If you’ve ever felt truly welcome somewhere in your life, recount that in almost every scenario that feeling comes along with access to decent, nourishing meals. Especially at a private university, food is how we are welcomed and how we are given the fuel and energy we need to succeed. It’s an investment in the students, a token of how much they care about seeing us flourish. 

Travel just three hours west and you’ll find UMass Amherst, a school titled “Best College Food in America” seven years in a row. But in this hurricane of capitalistic commoditization, it’s very clear what the biggest commodity is to Suffolk: us, the students. There’s the real business lesson Suffolk wants to give their students: Cut costs and pay no attention to the real people hurt by your decisions. Pretty soon we’ll need to start putting quarters into the elevators — actually, I don’t want to give them any ideas. Go rams!